The manufacturer of the integrated circuits (IC) semiconductor devices, flat panel displays, optoelectronics devices, data storage devices, magneto electronic devices, magneto optic devices, package devices, and the like entails the integration and sequencing of many unit processing steps. For example, IC manufacturing typically includes a series of processing steps such as cleaning, surface preparation, deposition, lithography, patterning, etching, planarization, implantation, thermal annealing and other related unit processing steps. The precise sequencing and integration of the units processing steps enables the formation of functional devices meeting desired performance specifications such as speed, power consumption, yield and reliability. Furthermore, the tools and equipment employed in device manufacturing have been developed to enable the processing of ever increasing substrate sizes such as the move to larger diameter wafers in order to fit more ICs per substrate per unit processing step for productivity and cost benefits. Other methods of increasing productivity and decreasing manufacturing costs include the use of batch reactors whereby multiple monolithic substrates can be processed in parallel. In these processing steps the entire monolithic substrate or batch substrates are processed uniformly, i.e., in the same fashion with the same resulting physical chemical, electrical, and the like properties across the monolithic substrate.
The ability to process uniformly across the entire monolithic substrate and/or across a series of substrates is advantageous for manufacturing costs and effectiveness as well as repeatability and control. However, processing the entire substrate can be disadvantageous when optimizing, qualifying or investigating new materials, new processes, and/or new process sequence integration scheme, since the entire substrate is nominally made the same using the same materials, processes and process sequence integration scheme. Thus, the full wafer uniform processing results in fewer data points per substrate, longer times to accumulate a wide variety of data and higher costs associated with obtaining such data.
Accordingly, there is a need to be able to more efficiently screen and analyze an array of materials, processes, and process sequence integration schemes across a substrate in order to further enhance the semiconductor manufacturing process.